Stay-at-home mom Evelyn Kocher can't forget the time she took her then six-year-old son Daniel to see the 2003 animated hit, Finding Nemo. The little boy was so terrified of the sharp-toothed sharks featured in the kid-friendly movie that he had nightmares for weeks.
Since that traumatic experience Kocher rarely takes Daniel to the movies, and is not considering changing that policy for the upcoming Harry Potter film.
Due out worldwide next Friday, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is rated PG-13, meaning that the US movie ratings board strongly advises parents to check out the film before allowing their children under the age of 13 to see it.
The previous three movies in the hit children's series derived from the best-selling books by JK Rowland were all granted the more lenient PG rating. But critics are unanimous that with its fiery and realistic dragons, the long-awaited appearance of the dreaded Voldemort and many other threatening scenes the new movie is "darker and scarier" than any of its predecessors.
Director Mike Newell is unapologetic about the possibility that his movie will scare the living day lights out of its young audience, noting that the most famous children's book series of modern times is designed to appeal to an increasingly older audience.
"The book itself is PG-13 and if you disappoint the book's audience you've really cut the legs out from under yourself," he said. "You have to deliver the book and the book's really scary."
But it isn't just Harry Potter that is stretching the limits of what is kid-appropriate.
So-called family films are increasingly filled with scary moments and double entendres that are designed to appeal to adults as much as children.
The recent claymation hit Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit featured a trigger-happy hunter targeting sweet little bunnies and a female character who holds two prize melons chest high in an obvious sexual reference. Disney's latest hit, Chicken Little also walks a fine line with images of evil aliens vaporizing an entire village.
In December kids will be begging their parents to go see Disney's adaptation of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe which is also filled with epic battle scenes and endless ghouls.
Defenders of such movies refer to traditional fairy tales which have often used scary elements in what experts say is a device to help children confront their deepest fears. They also point to what may be the most famous children's movie of all time, Walt Disney's Bambi which features a terrifying forest fire and the killing of Bambi's mother by an evil hunter.
But what worries some child advocates today is the realistic nature of many children's movies, which to an immature audience can appear just as real as the educational fare they may watch on the Discovery Channel. Additionally two recent studies by experts at Harvard University have identified how violence is increasingly creeping into kid's movies.
"A lot of these movies are going to be seen by four- and five-year-olds who will be horrified because their brains are simply not prepared to process the images," says Joanne Cantor, the author of the book `Mommy, I'm Scared': How TV and Movies Frighten Children and What We Can Do to Protect Them.
"Until they're six or seven, children's brains record fear of an image the same way they would if it had actually happened to them. And once their brains have recorded that fear, there really isn't anything parents can do to take it away."
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